


Creakybunk

by kpark



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Roommates/Housemates, M/M, almost slow burn... medium burn maybe... cooked well done, its silly but not crack
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2018-09-05
Packaged: 2019-07-02 22:26:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15805773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kpark/pseuds/kpark
Summary: Two guys with animal nicknames share a shitty dorm. They're equally awkward and dense. Sooner or later someone gets a crush.





	1. The Beginning of the Beginning

Ocelot isn’t sure what he expected. A room that looked moved into, at least. The only evidence that another person is occupying this dorm is a single cardboard box in the corner, already unpacked and empty; his roommate themself is nowhere to be found. When he snoops around a bit more, he finds that the closet has been half-filled with simple t-shirts and jeans, and a couple pairs of sweatpants. It’s equal parts eerie and relieving—at least he knows he’ll have more than enough room for his own belongings. 

Not that his belongings would have taken up much room in the first place. All he has is what he could fit into the three bags he could afford to load onto the plane over to America. One backpack on his back and one duffel bag in each hand. He drops both duffels on the ground next to the ladder of the bunk bed. Ducking under the top bunk, he sees that the bottom bunk has already been claimed. A very utilitarian-looking hiking backpack has been tossed onto the mattress, and a couple magazines sit there next to it. _National Geographic_. Huh. 

Usually he’d contest for the bottom bunk, but it seems evident already that whoever his roommate is won’t be the type of person to ask for much. He’ll let them have this.

It’s as he’s unpacking his first duffel bag and hanging clothes in the remaining half of the closet that he realizes he can only guess what his roommate is like off of the current state of the room. He never filled out the roommate questionnaire, never checked any of the schools forums… Now that he thinks about it, he never even opened that one email he remembers getting with the subject “Your New Roommate…”. Ocelot doesn’t bother digging for his phone to search for the email, it’s been dead for two hours. Instead, he lets his hand wander over to the clothes that aren’t his, and takes a closer look. The t-shirts have a massive color range of white, grey, brown, and black. The jeans all look old and worn, and the holes fraying the knees of a few pairs look like genuine wear and tear, not a manufactured fashion statement. All of the clothes have one thing in common: they’re big. 

Ocelot is creating a mental image of a rough and weathered, bulky man, and reaching for the size tag on a pair of the jeans, when the sound of a deep voice causes him to jump.

“What are you doing?”

Ocelot’s hands fly back to his sides and his head whips around to face the man staring blankly at him. If his heart weren’t already pounding from the impromptu jumpscare, his heart rate would have risen at the sight of him; and if he didn’t feel like a criminal caught in the act then he’d be half assed to feel satisfied, because his mental image wasn’t too far off.

“I-Ah, Um…” Ocelot stammers for just a moment before recovering, a recovery which fails when Ocelot notices something. “What’s in your hair?”

The man pauses and simply furrows his brow in confusion before running his fingers through his hair and hearing a dry rustling sound. He brings his hand down in front of his face and looks. “It’s uh… a leaf.” Ocelot thinks he sees a flush of color on his tanned cheeks. “Uh…”

“Why do you—” Ocelot is more lost than anything.

“John.” 

“Huh?” Ocelot is even more lost.

John sticks out a hand—not the one holding the leaf, which is being held stiffly at his side, as though he truly has no idea what to do with it—without saying anything else, and Ocelot has no doubt that this is the most awkward meeting he has had with anyone in his entire life.

“... Ocel—Uh, I mean. Adam.” He slowly reaches out a gloved hand, and isn’t surprised at all by the completely unnecessary strength of John’s grip. He must be straight.

Disappointed, but not surprised.

“Ocel?” John questions, with unwavering eye contact. Merciless.

Ocelot grimaces, regretting his words. “Ocelot. It’s a… nickname, I guess.”

“Ocelot, huh.” John is still gripping his hand. “Some people call me Snake.”

“Are you sure that’s not just an insult?”

“What?”

“It’s—You call—Nevermind,” Ocelot mutters, shaking his head. They’re beyond a sensical conversation at this point. “So…?” With the hand that isn’t being effectively strangled, Ocelot points at the leaf.

“Oh… I was out jogging… I got distracted.” At this point, Snake finally lets go of his hand, and returns his gaze to the dried maple leaf, its light orange color indicative of the coming autumn. “Hit a tree branch.”

Now that Ocelot has had a minute to get an eyeful, he’s not surprised. Maybe he’s not basketball material, but the guy’s big enough that if you walked into him you might think he was the tree. Ocelot taps a finger on his chin and tries to make it look like he’s imagining the scenario Snake described, not the scenario his brain is describing.

“What were you distracted by? Cute girl?” Ocelot asks with a quirk to the corner of his lip. Straight… until proven not. Oldest trick in the book.

“No,” Snake says flatly, not in any tone that would indicate he cares or doesn’t care about “cute girls”. Not helpful. “The mountains.”

“The mountains?”

“Up near the top of the trail, there’s a clearing in the trees every now and then. If you look, then the mountains are straight across from you.” 

Ocelot’s lips part a bit and his eyebrows raise in a rare expression of honest thoughtfulness. There’s something not just about the words, but the way he says them, that makes the appreciation of nature seem so matter-of-fact. Ocelot feels like he’s just learned something very interesting. Weird.

“You like the mountains, then?” Ocelot leans against the wall, and watches his new dorm-mate wander around the room looking for a trash can to throw that leaf in. 

Snake grunts in reply, not looking back at him. 

“Are you a snowboarder? I hear the mountains here are all the rage for that in the winter.”

“Hm, not particularly…” 

Snake tosses the leaf when he finds the tiny wire trash bin under the desk, then wordlessly turns to his bunk and begins looking through his backpack. Not one for conversation, then. Ocelot tuts, a bit annoyed by the standoffishness.

Ocelot sways back and forth for a moment, then pulls a pen out of his pocket and begins quietly twirling it in his fingers. He wonders if the boundaries for a roommate you just met three minutes ago dictate the necessity for conversation. At the same time, he can’t decide if he cares. Snake certainly doesn’t, so Ocelot doesn’t bother engaging, instead walking past him to quickly grab his wallet out of his backpack then heading outside.

Once he’s out of the dorm building he realizes he probably should have made some attempt to charge his phone, but he shrugs and keeps walking anyway. He has no one to call him, no alarms to wait for, and from what he knows of it, this is a safe and peaceful area. The worst case scenario is most likely being lost and late to dinner. 

Snake talked about “the trail”, but as Ocelot wanders around the perimeter of campus, he realizes how useless it was for him to call it that. There’s a trail for every ten meters he walks, it seems. Not that he’s complaining. Those and the streets of the city itself will give him something to waste time doing while he sorts his thoughts. Still twirling the pen, he continues on his way with no particular destination in mind.

When he finally comes back, he is indeed late to dinner. The cafeteria doors are being closed just as Ocelot reaches them, and he gets an apologetic look from the staff inside. Apologies don’t fill his stomach, unfortunately.

Not willing to spend the small amount of cash in his pocket on some vending machine chips, he shuffles back to the dorm. It’s well past dusk by the time he pushes through their door.

Again, he’s not sure what he expected. Lights on, maybe? It’s not _that late_ , 8:30 at the latest by now. Instead, he finds himself stumbling in the dark over to where he vaguely remembers a lamp should be, because three rounds of flicking the light switch on and off to no avail shows he can’t rely on the damn ceiling light. When yellow light floods the room, there’s a dissatisfied grunt and some shifting from the bottom bunk.

Ocelot cranes his neck to look at the mass currently rolling over on the bottom mattress.

“Are you _sleeping?_ ”

“Was…” A deep, groggy voice replies. There’s some crinkling like the sound of a plastic bag. 

Ocelot takes a step closer and begins to see that his charming new roommate is tangled up in the cheap blankets that came with the room, with one hand covering his eyes, and the other hand reaching into a chip bag peeking out of the sheets.

“Are you a bridge troll?”

“A huh?” 

“I guess it would be a bunk troll in this case.”

Snake turns on his side to face him, and in doing so, tips over the hiking backpack laying by his hip. It falls and hits the ground with a heavy thunk, and an apple rolls out.

Snake’s hand reaches out to grab the backpack by its top handle, but the motion is hindered by the slowness of sleep and Ocelot snatches it up first, and looks inside.

It’s food. All food. 

Apples, a few bananas, some mini oranges; a water bottle which, instead of containing water, is filled with granola; three plastic cups of yogurt; a small pile of protein bars; and two vending-machine-sized bags of Doritos.

“Is this what you brought? This is what you packed to bring here?” Ocelot eyes incredulously switch between looking at the bag and at Snake.

“No, it’s not,” Snake makes a small dive, his hand swooping out to grab the bag, but once more Ocelot is faster and yanks it out of his reach.

“What do you mean it’s not? I’m looking right at it.”

“I mean…” Snake makes another swipe, and finally gets a fist around one of the straps. It only takes one sturdy yank for Snake to win a contest of grip, and the backpack flies back onto the bed, albeit losing another apple to the floor in the process. “I got it from the cafeteria. I don’t have time for breakfast in the morning so I got some in advance.”

“They don’t let anyone take food out of the cafeteria, though. They just gave you that?”

Snake avoids eye contact, hanging his torso over the bed to grab an apple and toss it with surprising accuracy into the backpack behind him.

“And it was just dinner, they wouldn’t have breakfast food out yet…”

Lightbulb.

“You robbed the kitchen.”

“I didn’t rob it.”

“You stole that food!” Ocelot’s tone is more entertained than accusatory. 

“I pay everything I’ve got for tuition and a damn meal plan, this food belongs to me.” Snake glares at him and shields the backpack with his body like a bear protecting her cub, as if Ocelot is going to steal his booty and sell him out to the snack police.

Ocelot holds up his hands in mock surrender, his shoulders shaking with laughter. “What do you think I am, a spy? Steal all the food you want, doesn’t hurt me.”

Snake’s body loses a bit of its tension, but he keeps the backpack hidden safely behind him. Ocelot chuckles once more and grabs his own backpack off the floor, then turns on his heel and heads into the bathroom.

From his bed, Snake hears the sound of a shower starting. It’s then that he realizes two apples fell out of his bag, and he only picked up one. He leans off the edge of the bed again and checks underneath, scanning the floor. A minute of searching the room later, and Snake hears a faint _crunch_ that one wouldn’t expect to hear from a shower. Ah.

Oh well… If sharing is the price he pays for nabbing a week’s worth of snacks, so be it. 

He stares at the underside of the top bunk and slowly munches his way through the bag of chips at his side until it’s empty, finishing in such a timely fashion that Ocelot emerges from the bathroom just as Snake is lining up a shot with the trash bin. Ocelot’s head follows the balled-up bag as it flies through the air the way a cat’s eye follows a laser toy, and when it lands perfectly into the can he offers a brief applause. 

“Pretty good.”

Snake sticks out a thumbs up, then turns his back on Ocelot, reverting into the same lump of blankets obscured by shadow that he was when Ocelot first came back. 

Ocelot sighs with just a hint of frustration. He’d been hoping to unpack at least a little bit today, but it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen now. For a moment he considers unpacking regardless of his sleeping roommate, but watching the lump rise and fall with each drowsy breath like a metronome makes Ocelot think that some early sleep wouldn’t be so bad.

Ocelot looks apologetically at his bags for a moment. He came all the way here, haggled with an advisor, got into his dorm, met his roommate, found his way around town, and showered. That’s gotta be enough for one day, right? Now that he thinks about it, he didn’t sleep much on the flight over, either. Sleeping on airplanes was always difficult for him.

He gives in, only rifling through one of his duffles for a moment to get out a tank top and a pair of shorts. He changes in the bathroom and neatly folds up his laundry, placing it on top of the duffle bag when he comes out again. 

Ocelot climbs up to the top bunk on a ladder whose rungs are too far spaced out to be comfortably climbed, and the motion causes the whole bed to sway and creak. Snake who’d been about to fall asleep, opens his eyes and stares at the wall with tired eyes until the bed stops moving. But it doesn’t stop moving.

He can easily track Ocelot’s movement, because the bed makes a sound every single time he moves. Snake expects the noise to stop soon, since now Ocelot has crawled all the way into bed and situated himself for a good two minutes, so he closes his eyes. But it the noise doesn’t stop.

It does slow down though, and Snake tries his best to ignore it, imagine it’s something else. He’s just on a boat, that’s why he feels swaying every now and then. The intermittent squealing noise is… a pet mouse? Snake gives up twenty minutes in, when the top bunk shifts so much it loudly knocks the frame against the wall. 

“Listen, I understand if you have problems with sleeping…”

“I’m fine.”

“I’m… sure you are. Just stop tossing and turning.”

Ocelot does stop tossing and turning, for a while. Snake is finally on the verge of sleep once more when the mattress above him squeaks again. It’s going to be a long year.


	2. The Middle Of The Beginning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> [Chapter Summary](https://i.imgur.com/AEJXd56.jpg)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my dear good friend sneak surprised me with [art for chapter 1](https://twitter.com/sneakydeaths/status/1036018860326117382), please supply them with well-deserved attention  
> 

The day after passed in relative monotony. Ocelot unpacked his belongings, mostly clothes, and some school supplies. The only decorative thing he’d brought was an old poster of America he’d kept in his room back home for years. He pinned it to the ceiling above his bed where only he can see it, and although he’d never say it, not even to himself, it feels like a testament of how hard he worked to come here. It wasn’t a mistake.

John didn’t unpack anything more, just lounged on his bunk with his headphones in, flipping back and forth through his few magazines. He must wake up early, because both yesterday and today Ocelot woke up to the sound of the shower running. 

Yesterday, Ocelot had woken up panicked and confused, not recognizing the room he was in. He jolted up and slammed his head into the ceiling, just as Snake opened the bathroom door. He’d looked at Ocelot curiously, asked if he was okay. Meanwhile Ocelot had a look on his face like he’d been tased awake. His hands were gripping his forehead where he’d given it an impromptu introduction to the ceiling, and Snake could see Ocelot’s eyes peeking between his forearms, blown wide. Ocelot had, by then, realized where he was, and was no longer panicked because of that. Now he was panicked because staring right at him was a man with a sturdy, muscular body, with dark hair covering his torso and droplets of water still clinging to his skin, his face flushed from the humid heat of their rather stuffy bathroom. One of Snake’s hands was gripping the towel wrapped around his hips. Ocelot has since learned the reason for this—the towels are too short to be tied in place around Snake’s thick body. Overall, it had been too much to process at 8 in the morning, and rather than reply Ocelot groaned and collapsed back onto his bunk, face-first this time. 

This morning, Ocelot is wiser. When he hears the click of the bathroom door opening, he doesn’t sit up, just peers through the wooden slats of the barrier that runs around his bunk. As he does this, of course, he thinks, “Maybe I shouldn’t do this”. Because becoming attracted to your dorm mate isn’t the best idea at all, especially after only knowing each other for a couple days. Unfortunately rational thought has never been an effective mediator, so Ocelot stares as Snake comes out of the bathroom from his morning shower once more. 

Snake nudges the door shut with his hip, putting strain on the too-small towel. He adjusts his grip quickly, but the towel inches down despite his efforts. When Snake turns to head over to the closet, Ocelot can see the dimples at the base of his back. 

Halfway there, Snake stops in his tracks. He turns his head, and looks at Ocelot’s bunk from the corner of his eye. 

Time starts moving in slow motion, and all in the space of one second, Ocelot freezes, then closes his eyes and lets his body go limp. Play dead. He waits ten seconds before opening one eye just a crack, and he can’t be sure, but he thinks he sees Snake smirk before continuing to the closet. Snake drops the towel, and before Ocelot can shift so that the barrier surrounding his bed isn’t obscuring his vision, Snake has already slipped on briefs and is pulling jeans up over his thighs. Ocelot watches the way the muscles of his arms and shoulders flex as he buttons his jeans and pulls a grey t-shirt over his head. Then he plays dead once more before Snake can turn around and catch him ogling. 

The next thing Ocelot hears—and feels, actually—is the creaking of the bunk beneath him, surprisingly soft in comparison to the noises Ocelot manages to get out of the bed, as Snake settles onto his mattress. Then comes some shuffling, quiet, and… muffled speaking? A voice… 

Ocelot decides now is a good time as ever to pretend as if he’s just now waking up. He takes a deep breath and stretches a little, immediately prompting a _squeeeak_ from the poor bed frame, followed by smaller _squeak, squeak, squeak_ s as he climbs down to the floor.

In the most inconspicuous fashion he can manage, he begins to busy himself with organizing his meager school supplies, right in front of Snake’s bunk. As he puts notebooks into his backpack he listens, and realizes the voice is something Snake is listening to through his headphones. Maybe it’s a podcast or something. There’s only one voice. And there’s no beat or melody other than the voice, so if it’s music, it’s not very good.

Ocelot begins to zip up the backpack, and the voice stops. Snake has taken out one of his earbuds and is staring at Ocelot.

“What?” Ocelot’s eyes go wide against his own will.

“You keep looking at me. Is there something you need?” He levels Ocelot with a half-lidded yet careful gaze. He doesn’t exactly look annoyed, but he’s not jumping for joy at Ocelot’s attention. 

“No, I…” Ocelot looks at his bag, then back at Snake. “I’m heading out to the bookstore, I was actually gonna ask if _you_ need something.” 

Snake looks surprised for a second. He raises his eyebrows, then tilts his head a bit. “... No. I have everything I need.”

Ocelot came up with the plan of going to the bookstore on the spot, but it wasn’t bullshit. In all honestly Ocelot completely forgot about the concept of textbooks, and the fact that he now has to lay down more money than he wants to to get them. He hopes the school bookstore at least has some used book deals. Worst case scenario, he can sneak into a corner and take pictures of all the pages he needs, then read them on his phone. This is the age of innovation, after all.

Once there, he finds his first two books with surprising ease, in a suspicious stroke of luck. All things considered, the odds were not in his favor. It’s _not_ surprising when, after searching for fifteen minutes, Ocelot spots the cover of his math textbook in the hands of a young woman. It’s the last of that textbook, at least in this store. If Ocelot were any smarter he would have bought the book weeks ago; the math class he’s taking is unfortunately one of the biggest classes in the whole school, of course everyone’s going to be looking for the textbook. If Ocelot were any humbler, he’d turn tail and run to some other bookstore, look for a different copy. But Ocelot isn’t humble, and although he wasn’t smart enough to look ahead, he is clever enough to take advantage of the present.

So he sidles up to the young woman, politely asks if they’ve met before (they haven’t), and sparks a conversation. He throws in a compliment or two, not genuine at all but innocent enough to appear so. Amidst all the talking she sets the book down, and Ocelot picks it up in a natural, smooth motion as if he had been the one holding it all along. He strains to keep his voice amicable and his cheeks already feel sore from smiling, but Ocelot is nothing if not perseverant. They talk all the way to the cashier, and through all of the time the cashier spends bagging the books and driving metaphorical knives into Ocelot’s bank account. When Ocelot glances at the receipt, he thinks maybe it would have been wiser to just buy a copy online. When Ocelot waves goodbye to the young woman and walks out the door with that math book in his hand, it strokes his ego just enough to ease the pain. Hopefully his wounds will be healed a bit more when the class is over and he can resell the book.

The rest of the day passes much like the day before it, with Ocelot thoroughly bored but not particularly motivated to do anything exciting. He stops by the corner store and buys some pens and a soda, and walks back to the dorm at the speed of someone who has nothing to do when they get where they’re going.

When he steps through the door, the lesson he began to learn when he first arrived is finally cemented. Expect the unexpected. Even better yet, just learn not to expect. 

“Snake?”

Snake looks briefly over his shoulder, nods at him. “Ocelot.” He then returns to doing what he was doing, which for all intents and purposes looks to be disabling the smoke alarm.

“You have a taste for policy violations or something?”

“I have a taste for cigars.” A certain self-satisfaction is clearly audible in Snake’s voice.

Snake continues to work for a minute until he gets a look in his eye like he suddenly has remembered something important. “Ocelot.” Snake knocks on the wood of the top bunk, which he is currently kneeling on to reach the smoke detector, to get Ocelot’s attention.

Ocelot, who has taken refuge in Snake’s bunk for the time being, leans his head out to look up at Snake.

“By the way, you don’t mind if I smoke, right?” The question is clearly out of basic common courtesy, though Ocelot can’t tell whether the sentiment is genuine or not.

Ocelot’s face scrunches up. It’s not that he can’t stand smoking, but the thought of smoke in this tiny, poorly ventilated room isn’t the most pleasant idea. “I get the feeling that even if I say I mind, you’d smoke anyway.”

Snake smiles. “I’d be sneakier about it.”

Snake’s smile is not a charming smile. It’s tight and doesn’t really look natural—It almost prompts a laugh from Ocelot. But at the same time, Ocelot gets a fuzzy feeling in his stomach, and he doesn’t like it. So instead of humoring him further, Ocelot huffs and shakes his head, going back under the bunk where Snake can’t see him.

Snake finishes taping up the now-useless smoke detector, then hops down to the floor. He finds Ocelot flipping through a math textbook, going through the pages at a rate that indicate he’s not really absorbing the information, just perusing the content with a look of suppressed distress on his face.

“Scared of numbers, Ocelot?” Snake asks as he tosses a roll of white masking tape into his backpack, sitting open at the base of the bed. 

Ocelot scoffs and glares at Snake from behind the pages, but the anger is softened by an honest nervousness behind his eyes. “Actually, I’m pretty good at math. But…”

“But?”

“The class requires a calculator.” Ocelot sets the book down and holds up empty hands. “Which I don’t have.”

Snake crosses his arms, eyeing him closely. “When does your math class start?”

“Tomorrow. At 8:30.” Ocelot leans back against the wall, flipping the cover of the book so it closes with a hefty _thud_. 

“Hm.” Snake looks like he’s thinking about something. He stands there for a moment, weight shifted to one leg, before apparently finishing the thought. “You’ll live.”

Ocelot glares again.

He does live, though. The next morning, Ocelot sits through a whole first class of nothing but review, and Ocelot has enough basic competence about the subjects to survive without a calculator. The more difficult thing to survive is the droning voice of the professor, which when combined with the warmth of the classroom, is slowly lulling him to sleep. The only thing keeping him awake is the rapid bouncing of his legs and the paper clip he found on the floor, which he is slowly unraveling and twisting into a metal spiral. His bouncing is causing his chair to squeak, quietly enough that most of the room isn’t able to hear, but loud enough to prompt a nasty look from the person next to him. Ocelot shoots the look right back and continues bouncing to his heart’s content until his daily sentence in mathematical prison is finished. 

When he exits the building, he notices a familiar figure sitting at a picnic table across the plaza. He doesn’t have his next class until the evening, and even if he decided to leave this area he’d end up walking right past the table, making it impossible to entirely avoid him if he really wanted to. Ocelot doesn’t have any reason to avoid Snake though, so he walks over to the table and sits down. Snake doesn’t acknowledge him, staring at something on the device in front of him. An iPad, it looks like. 

“Hey,” Ocelot greets him. 

Snake ignores him still, and that’s when Ocelot realizes he has his headphones in again. Ocelot leans over and waves his hand, and that’s when Snake looks up. He’s fairly surprised, both that someone felt the need to break his peaceful solitude, and that the someone is his new roommate. “Hey.”

“Did you have class here?” 

“Yeah,” Snake points a thumb at the building behind them, facing opposite across the plaza from the building Ocelot had just come from. “Botany. But all I learned today was how to make a paper crane.”

“Why were you doing origami in a Botany class?”

“I wasn’t, the person in front of me was. They folded the syllabus about five different ways until it started to tear.”

Ocelot lets a chuckle escape his lips at that. Snake lets his eyes follow as one corner of Ocelot’s mouth raises higher than the other into a sort of half smirk, seeing how one sharp canine tooth barely peeks out of the smile. 

The crisp and cooling autumn air blows a gentle breeze that rustles the leaves hanging off the plaza’s trees, and one of them, familiar in shape, falls onto their table. 

“What classes do you have today?” Snake asks, watching Ocelot’s gloved fingers pick up the maple leaf and begin spinning it by rolling the stem between his thumb and forefinger.

“Ah… Math and Political Science.” Ocelot grimaces at he says the names.

“Oh that’s right, math.” A smile slides across Snake’s face. “You lived after all.” Snake reaches across the table to pat Ocelot on the shoulder, a single short pat that’s just as aggressive and jarring as his over-strong handshake. It leaves Ocelot feeling like he knows what those little hula girls on the top of car dashboards feel. 

“Yeah, yeah. What about your classes?”

“Just got out of Botany, and in…” Snake checks his wristwatch, an interesting course of action considering he has an iPad showing the time right in front of him. “...Fifteen minutes, I have Biology.” 

Ocelot nods. “Biology. Like cells and things like that.”

Snake nods as well. “... Yeah.” He doesn’t need to ask to figure that the highest level of biology Ocelot is aware of is the content you’d find in a middle school science class. Fair enough.

“What else?”

“Just Bio. With my schedule I have the lab session right after, but there’s no lab the first week. So I’ll get the day off after this.” 

“Nice. Any plans?”

Snake shrugs, and looks back down to his iPad. Ocelot notices a notification pop up on the top of the screen. Snake taps it, then tilts the iPad towards himself so Ocelot no longer has a view. He spends a while typing—to Ocelot’s amusement, Snake types only with his right index finger, one letter at a time. Just when Ocelot is beginning to assume that Snake has no answer for him other than the shrug, Snake’s attention returns to him, and he says, “Eating.”

A whole 8 hours later, Ocelot bursts through the door. He looks around frantically for a moment until he locks eyes with Snake, who’s on the top bunk for some reason.

“Why are you up—” Ocelot starts, then stops himself. “Nevermind. Snake, you’re not gonna _believe_ this.”

“What?”

“I just met the _stupidest_ person in the world. Three incredibly stupid people actually, but one of them really _the stupidest_. Oh, my God,” Ocelot puts his hands on either side of his head and begins explaining in fervent detail a series of objectively dumb questions and subsequent trails of conversation that happened in his political studies class. Apparently the news of this idiocy was so profound that Ocelot was compelled to run all the way from class directly back to the dorm. While he’s storytelling, Ocelot gradually gravitates towards the bed, until he’s sitting on the top bunk right next to Snake. He talks with his hands just as intensely as he does with his mouth, and comes dangerously close to slapping Snake more than once.

Beneath their combined weight and Ocelot’s erratic motions, the bed whines pathetically. At some point Snake realizes he has one hand on the railing as if he’s bracing himself for a fall. Maybe the bottom bunk really was a bad idea.

“Anyway,” Ocelot has a lazy grin, like some aristocrat woman laying on her plush couch, finishing a glass of fine wine. Something about talking shit really must invigorate him. “Why the top bunk?”

“There was a dorm check before you got back. I had to untape the smoke detector.” Now that Snake says it, Ocelot notices a single piece of tape stuck to the inside of the bed’s railing behind him.

“Damn, they didn’t see anything, right?”

“What do you take me for, an amateur?” Snake reaches past Ocelot, peeling the tape off of the railing. Snake’s arm touches his on the way back, and Ocelot stifles a shiver. “I talked to some people, figured out in advance that there would be a check. Got some hints on the future dates too. It’ll be no problem.”

“If you say so.” Ocelot raises his eyebrows. “But if you get caught, it’s all on your head. I’m not helping you.”

“Fine by me.” Snake puts one hand on the railing and leans over, with the plan to vault over the side. But the bed makes a lurch, so Snake reconsiders. He sits back down, then points to the ladder, which is behind Ocelot. “I gotta, uh.” 

Ocelot follows his finger, and gets the message. “Oh. Right. Yeah.” Ocelot moves to the side as best as he can so Snake can get by, but twin mattresses weren’t optimally designed for two adult men, and the movement is as easy as parallel parking on an inner city street. At one point they’re nearly pressed against each other chest-to-chest, little more than a few centimeters between them, and the swaying of the bed threatens to knock them together. To both Ocelot’s relief and disappointment, this doesn’t happen, and Snake escapes the bunk successfully. 

About twenty minutes later, Snake is heading out the door. “I’m going to dinner. Do you want me to bring you back something?”

“Huh? You c—” Ocelot almost protests before he sees Snake’s backpack on his shoulders, and remembers his stunt from a few days ago. Snake sees him remember in real time, and smirks when Ocelot’s face falls into an expression that says _Actually, I guess you’re right, yeah._ “Well, I’m hungry, but I don’t really know what the cafeteria is serving tonight.” 

Snake doesn’t look like he wants to sit around and wait for Ocelot to look up the menu. He opens the door and says back to him, “I’ll surprise you.”

“I’m sure you will,” Ocelot replies as the door shuts. He’s not overjoyed by the prospect of Snake choosing his dinner instead of him, but hey, free food delivery, right? Or something like that.

As much as Snake has talked about eating these past few days, Ocelot hasn’t actually seen too much of him doing that. They go to the cafeteria at different times, and the only time they’ve seen each other outside of the dorm was today in the plaza. All Ocelot knows for certain is that Snake has no inhibitions. Ocelot prepares himself for spaghetti in a ziploc bag.

Maybe Ocelot shouldn’t have prepared himself for anything though, because now it’s 8pm and there’s no Snake in sight. Being that he has no idea when to expect Snake to come back, he’s just about resigned himself to a night without dinner. But… Snake might have some food laying around in the room.

Ocelot climbs down from the bunk, each individual rung of the ladder whining, and commences Operation: Locate A Protein Bar. He starts out sneaky, subtle. Just looking around the room to see if anything is out in plain sight. The answer to that is no. Ocelot’s stomach growls. He slides onto Snake’s bunk, and begins digging through the covers. He lifts up the pillows, looks underneath. Finally, Ocelot hears the familiar crinkling noise of a granola bar’s wrapper, coming from underneath his knee. He struggles a bit more then finds the bar wrapped up in the sheets. He opens it and with all the finesse in the world, shoves half of it into his mouth.

“After all I’ve done for you.”

Snake comes into the room face-to-face with Ocelot kneeling on his bed, two hands holding the remaining half of the bar, cheeks full of sticky granola. 

“I wasn’t expecting you to take two hours to walk to the cafeteria and back!” Ocelot says, but since he’s chewing as he speaks, it sounds more like “Ah wuvn’t expefcting oo to take two hours do alk to uh cavuhtera an back!”

Snake is a fluent in full-mouth-ese, so he understands. 

“It’s not polite to take what’s not yours.”

“You’re one to talk, heist-master.”

Snake considers this, and opts to sigh rather than argue back. 

“What’s for dinner?” Ocelot asks, and Snake walks over to the desk, swinging his backpack in front of him and unzipping it.

He pulls out a massive yellow lump and drops it on the desk. It’s the equivalent of a couple bowls worth of noodles, without the bowls. It’s held into an ugly heap only by tightly wound plastic Saran wrap.

“Spaghetti.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'll tell you guys a secret. in a true metal gear style, i'm not actually writing this in chronological order. the google doc is like a rubik's cube.  
> [visual demonstration](https://i.imgur.com/F6wMp9a.png)


End file.
